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Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood was the commander of the 16-man Special Forces security detail at the U.S. embassy in Tripoli, Libya, until the State Department ordered him and his men home on August 5, 2012 and never replaced them.

Despite repeated pleas from Ambassador Chris Stevens and his State Department security officers in Tripoli that they remain in Libya, Washington wouldn’t listen.

Colonel Wood remains perplexed at what happened on the night Ambassador Stevens was murdered, and in a recent conversation, recalled a similar event in June 2012 when the British ambassador came under RPG attack while visiting Benghazi.

“When I went to help the British ambassador, we got to the scene faster than the CIA team did on September 11. I went over to the CIA Annex, waited for the 18 Delta medic to grab his kit, then left immediately,” he told me.

“Why would they say ‘get over there as quick as you can’ when the British ambassador gets attacked, and say ‘wait’ when it’s our own ambassador?” he wondered.

And yet, that’s the behavior former deputy CIA Director Mike Morell told the House intelligence committee was “a very prudent decision.”

Their report was welcomed by the national media as the final nail in the coffin of Republican-led Congressional investigations.

Many conservatives have been pushing for Rep. Trey Gowdy (R, SC) to play his cards, even as his investigators continue to conduct their probe far from the media spotlight.

The Washington Post has already proclaimed Gowdy’s investigation “superfluous,” and last week blasted “unfounded conspiracy theories” propounded by Republicans for distracting from the “big mistake in Libya policy… [which] was President Obama’s refusal to support the new government’s attempt to build security after he helped topple the nation’s longtime dictator.”

In Gruberesque fashion, the Post failed to mention that Ambassador Stephens was still talking to Prime Minister candidates for the “new government” on the day he was brutally murdered, as his Diary shows.

But hey, what difference do the facts make when there’s a presidential campaign afoot? The Post and other members of the Hillary Clinton support society (aka the national media) have demonstrated they will spare no ink, tar, or feathers to besmirch anyone who gets close to the truth, and will pass up no opportunity to claim this investigation over before it’s even begun.

That’s why Gowdy must (and is) treading carefully as he navigates the labyrinthine minefield constructed by partisan hacks and entrenched bureaucrats to hide the truth.

One of the first things Gowdy did was to hire a three-star U.S. Army general as his chief counsel. Lieutenant General Dana Chipman had just stepped down as the Judge Advocate General (JAG) for the United States Army, where in his own words he had led “a legal enterprise consisting of 5,000 personnel in 600 offices in 20 countries.”

Prior to that, General Chipman was the chief lawyer for U.S. Central Command and U.S. Special Operations Command, stepping into that hot seat in June 2003 just as U.S. forces switched from liberators to occupiers in Iraq.

The three stars on Chipman’s shoulderboards give him the authority to candidly question anyone in the military chain of command that night without concerns more junior officers might have about disputing the wisdom of an order from on high.

Many in the military have been asking why reinforcements weren’t flown in from Croatia, where a fifty-man U.S. Army counter-terrorism/hostage-rescue unit known as C-110 was on a military training mission.

C-110 was the Commanders In-Extremis Force (CIF) for European Command, a rapid reaction force capable of getting men and equipment into their C-130s to respond to a crisis in somewhere between two to six hours.

Because C-110 was slated to become the Africom CIF on October 1, Africom commanders were intimately aware of its capabilities, and its current position – roughly two hours flight time from Benghazi. But instead of flying directly to Benghazi, C-110 was told to stage en route at Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily, Italy, where it stopped.

The diversion order was given from the Pentagon, not by Africom headquarters in Stuttgart. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Martin Dempsey, has claimed in Congressional testimony that the earliest C-110 could have left Croatia was 6 AM the morning of September 12th – a statement disputed by members of the unit who have spoken anonymously to the media.

Were the commanders of this powerful hostage-rescue unit champing at the bit but told to stand down? If so, by who? And why?

We know the official reasons why C-110 was not sent. Africom commander General Carter Ham and his subordinates have all testified that in the “fog of war” they believed they were facing a situation similar to the 1979 Tehran hostage crisis and needed more time to gather intelligence and plan a hostage rescue operation.

But General Ham also told Rep. Jason Chaffetz, who is slated to succeed Rep. Darrell Issa as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform committee, that he never sent boots onto the ground in Benghazi because the State Department “never asked.”

That explanation was buttressed by testimony from Brigadier General Robert Lovell, the Africom deputy director for intelligence (J2), this past May, where he explained that in the spirit of “expeditionary” diplomacy – a favorite Hillary Clinton term – the military was “waiting for a request for assistance from the State Department” before moving reinforcements into Libya.

The answer to this question could help determine who bears the responsibility for leaving brave four men to die that night.

Did the desire to demonstrate that Obama was “not Bush” drive the administration to abandon any recourse to military action? We know that Hillary Clinton was so obsessed by not deploying boots on the ground in Libya that she ordered Colonel Wood and his 16-man Special Forces unit guarding Ambassador Stevens to never appear in public in uniform, not even their boots, until her underlings told them to leave Libya on August 5, 2012 altogether.

We also know that Mrs. Clinton issued two very specific stand-down orders on the night of September 11, 2012:

• She refused to convene the counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), the only structured, experienced interagency reaction team that could have decided which resources of the government were available for immediate deployment, despite pleas from a top counter-terrorism advisor, Mark Thompson.

• She refused to activate the State Department-led Foreign Emergency “Support Team (FEST), an extraordinary operational unit whose sole purpose was to rescue U.S. diplomats under attack.

Her entire effort that night and ever since has been to draw as little attention as possible to U.S. government activities in Benghazi. What was she trying to hide?

As the House Select Committee on Benghazi prepares for its first hearing this week, a former State Department diplomat is coming forward with a startling allegation: Hillary Clinton confidants were part of an operation to “separate” damaging documents before they were turned over to the Accountability Review Board investigating security lapses surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

According to former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell, the after-hours session took place over a weekend in a basement operations-type center at State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. This is the first time Maxwell has publicly come forward with the story.

At the time, Maxwell was a leader in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which was charged with collecting emails and documents relevant to the Benghazi probe.

As the House Select Committee on Benghazi prepares for its first hearing this week, a former State Department diplomat is coming forward with a startling allegation: Hillary Clinton confidants were part of an operation to “separate” damaging documents before they were turned over to the Accountability Review Board investigating security lapses surrounding the Sept. 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

According to former Deputy Assistant Secretary Raymond Maxwell, the after-hours session took place over a weekend in a basement operations-type center at State Department headquarters in Washington, D.C. This is the first time Maxwell has publicly come forward with the story.

At the time, Maxwell was a leader in the State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, which was charged with collecting emails and documents relevant to the Benghazi probe.

“I was not invited to that after-hours endeavor, but I heard about it and decided to check it out on a Sunday afternoon,” Maxwell says.

He didn’t know it then, but Maxwell would ultimately become one of four State Department officials singled out for discipline—he says scapegoated—then later cleared for devastating security lapses leading up to the attacks. Four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were murdered during the Benghazi attacks.

‘Basement Operation’

Maxwell says the weekend document session was held in the basement of the State Department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters in a room underneath the “jogger’s entrance.” He describes it as a large space, outfitted with computers and big screen monitors, intended for emergency planning, and with small offices on the periphery.

When he arrived, Maxwell says he observed boxes and stacks of documents. He says a State Department office director, whom Maxwell described as close to Clinton’s top advisers, was there. Though the office director technically worked for him, Maxwell says he wasn’t consulted about her weekend assignment.

“She told me, ‘Ray, we are to go through these stacks and pull out anything that might put anybody in the [Near Eastern Affairs] front office or the seventh floor in a bad light,’” says Maxwell. He says “seventh floor” was State Department shorthand for then-Secretary of State Clinton and her principal advisers.

A few minutes after he arrived, Maxwell says, in walked two high-ranking State Department officials.

In an interview Monday morning on Fox News, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, named the two Hillary Clinton confidants who allegedly were present: One was Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s chief of staff and a former White House counsel who defended President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial. The other, Chaffetz said, was Deputy Chief of Staff Jake Sullivan, who previously worked on Hillary Clinton’s and then Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns.

Eric Stahl, who recently retired as a major in the U.S. Air Force, served as commander and pilot of the C-17 aircraft that was used to transport the corpses of the four casualties from the Benghazi attacks – then-U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods – as well as the assault’s survivors from Tripoli to the safety of an American military base in Ramstein, Germany.

In an exclusive interview on Fox News’ “Special Report,” Stahl said members of a CIA-trained Global Response Staff who raced to the scene of the attacks were “confused” by the administration’s repeated implication of the video as a trigger for the attacks, because “they knew during the attack…who was doing the attacking.” Asked how, Stahl told anchor Bret Baier: “Right after they left the consulate in Benghazi and went to the [CIA] safehouse, they were getting reports that cell phones, consulate cell phones, were being used to make calls to the attackers’ higher ups.”

A separate U.S. official, one with intimate details of the bloody events of that night, confirmed the major’s assertion. The second source, who requested anonymity to discuss classified data, told Fox News he had personally read the intelligence reports at the time that contained references to calls by terrorists – using State Department cell phones captured at the consulate during the battle – to their terrorist leaders. The second source also confirmed that the security teams on the ground received this intelligence in real time.

If the teams knew, then Obama, Hillary and Rice knew. They were also determined to lie and mislead.

If the CIA wanted to smuggle guns to Syria or interrogate al-Qaeda suspects in Benghazi, that was its business, not necessarily the administration’s. To the degree Obama was involved in overseeing events in Libya, his involvement was most likely limited to a vague warning that, in the latter part of the nip-and-tuck 2012 campaign, there must not be anything resembling a shoot-’em-up Mogadishu, which a beefed-up security presence in Benghazi might have made more likely by evening the odds. Better to keep a low profile amid increasing security threats and hope for the best. And, if the worst happens — well, things do happen.

When the violence did erupt, a freelance video producer became the perfect villain. Obama and his subordinates, principally Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton, almost immediately damned the hapless filmmaker as having incited global violence by his bigotry. The more Obama told the world that he too condemned Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (and in fact he had Mr. Nakoula jailed on a trumped-up probation violation), the more Benghazi became a sort of revolutionary morality tale: Right-wingers in America keep getting innocent people killed by gratuitously inflaming Muslims — over the objections of sober and judicious progressive and internationalist Americans.

It worked. Benghazi fizzled. Obama was reelected. Mr. Nakoula cooled his heels in jail. (Should Dinesh D’Souza have learned a lesson about what is in store for inconvenient filmmakers?) Obama had gone to bed early the night of Benghazi and washed his hands of the inconvenience, and for the last two years the military, the intelligence agencies, the State Department, and the media have been blame-gaming one another.

Like this:

The Ben Rhodes e-mail has demolished the Obama administration’s defense that the White House had nothing to do with the infamous talking points ascribing the Benghazi tragedy to a spontaneous protest over an American-made anti-Muslim video. Even some of the White House correspondents accustomed to carrying water for the Obama administration clashed with White House spokesman Jay Carney, who shamelessly tried to sell them this bill of goods. Nobody likes being played for a sucker.

Now it is crystal-clear that the administration, right from the start, was intimately involved in a deceptive scheme aimed at deflecting the blame for the death of four Americans killed in the terrorist assault in Benghazi. But rather than clarify the situation, the Rhodes e-mail has only deepened the mystery.

What is the reason for the frantic, concerted effort to cover up the truth about Benghazi? Considering that it’s the cover-up rather than the deed itself that does all the damage, wouldn’t it have been safer to acknowledge the fact of a terrorist attack and disclose all relevant information, putting an end to the controversy? And yet the White House and its allies are fighting tooth and nail to prevent the American people from knowing what happened on that fateful day. Why?

As reported by Kenneth Timmerman,top military brass at AFRICOM headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany watched live video feed from a Predator drone over Benghazi, which clearly showed no protests. The CIA station chief in Tripoli, in his report to Langley, not just indicated, but emphasized that there were no protests. Former AFRICOM’s Deputy Intelligence Chief Brigadier General (Ret.) Robert Lovell testified under oath to the same effect, and so did even Mike Morell, the smarmy ex-CIA deputy director.

Former CBS news reporter Sharyl Attkisson has uncovered an e-mail sent by Acting Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East Beth Jones describing her conversation with Libya’s Ambassador at 9:45 am on Sept. 12, 2012. Atkisson reported, “When [the Libyan Ambassador] said his government suspected that former Qaddafi regime elements carried out the attack, I told him the group that conducted the attacks – Ansar al-Sharia – is affiliated with Islamic extremists.”

The classic cover-up question – “What did they know, and when did they know it?” – does not apply in this case. We know that the White House and the State Department were fully informed about the events in Benghazi practically from the get-go.

Why did Hillary Clinton’s State Department resolutely turn down the many pleas for enhancing security at the Benghazi compound with which Ambassador Stevens bombarded his superiors, warning about the growing extremist threat?

Why didn’t the administration prepare for likely terrorist attacks on the anniversary of 9/11? Didn’t they know the Islamists’ propensity to time their attacks to mark important anniversaries, above all that of their “glorious victory over the Great Satan”? The Bush administration knew it and always prepared for such attacks, but Obama’s White House ignored the danger. Why?

Why was nothing done to rescue the besieged Americans in Benghazi? The Pentagon insists that there were no resources available to mount a rescue expedition. But many military experts insist it’s not true: much could have been done to relieve the pressure on the Special Mission Compound and the Annex.

Furthermore, according to Kenneth Timmerman (ibid.), orders were issued, then recalled, to deploy a 50-man Special Forces unit from Croatia that could have reached Benghazi within hours. Who ordered that unit to stand down, and why?

What accounts for the stonewalling on the part of the administration? Why has it strenuously refused to comply with the House subpoenas for its Benghazi-related internal communications? Why have none of the Benghazi survivors been allowed to testify to Congress about their first-hand experiences? And why has the FBI refused to divulge the records of its interrogations? Is the White House afraid of what those records might tell?

Ezra Klein’s latest online news venture, Vox.com, advertises itself as the place to go if you want the news explained to you. What we are already discovering, though, is that Vox is just a nicer-looking version of Media Matters: a place where leftists pretending to be wonks use cherry-picked data to explain why leftists are objectively 100% correct about everything.

In other words, Vox is just another left-wing propaganda machine built to give our objective, unbiased, not-at-all-liberal media the skewed left-wing data and talking points they so desire.

But if Vox were to be true to its mission, when it came to explaining why our unbiased, objective, not-at-all-liberal media is and will continue to do everything in its power to ensure the American people never learn the truth about Benghazi, it would read something like this…

The more effective pushback [against the Benghazi Select Committee] will come from Big Media. Network leaders, producers and newspaper editors did not go after the story when the first serious questions began to bubble up. Afterward they dismissed the questions as old news. Now they are defensive and resentful. They are not going to help Republican investigators do the job they themselves should have done. (If they’d done it there might be no need for another investigation, because people might feel satisfied they know the essential facts.) Any proof of a Democratic coverup will have the appearance of indicting the media, too.

That’s Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal. She might not be explaining the news, but she is perfectly explaining the news media.

Let’s not forget that the media became complicit and part of the Benghazi cover-up within hours of the fatal attack. Just eight weeks out from what was looking like a close election, the media immediately circled the wagons to protect the president.

Just days before, at his nominating convention, Obama had assured America that he had all but defeated al Qaeda. Then… Four Americans died at the hands of an al Qaeda franchise in a consulate compound that was pretty much left undefended, despite repeated requests for additional security and the red-circled anniversary of September 11.

To protect Obama, the media turned its fire on Romney (for a full nine days) because he dared criticize a decision the administration made to apologize for free speech in another Middle Eastern country. The goal was to take voters’ eyes off of Obama’s incompetence and dishonesty.

The media only dug itself in deeper a few days later when it became obvious the White House had lied about a video being the reason for the Benghazi attack. Even “60 Minutes” joined the cover-up. It was all about the media coordinating to push Obama over the re-election finish line.

Now the media are in a deep dark hole and as desperate to protect themselves as they are Obama and Hillary. The fabricated two-year myth that pretends Benghazi and the ensuing White House cover-up are all part of a partisan nothingburger must survive. So much is at stake for the media: their need to lie to themselves, the hope of another Clinton presidency, and the legacy of Obama, whom they assured us was up for the job.

The media today are like a trapped animal and therefore a very dangerous one. The House Select Committee has a desperate, bitter, and venomous foe to deal with… and the Democrats.

Read Noonan’s full column. She also points out quite accurately what Republican lawmakers have so far done terribly wrong and what they must to do right if they are to thwart the media and get to the truth.

ADDED: My thanks to a commenter for this video of Trey Gowdy challenging the media to answer the unanswered questions about Benghazi. The media can’t answer these questions and don’t want them answered:

Why doesn’t the mainstream media want these questions answered?

****************

Megyn Kelly on Politics and the press:

Here’s an interesting maneuver by Washington Post to be on “the right side of history” noted by Daniel Greenfield:

Former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson quipped Monday on Fox and Friends that if she let all the left-wing blogs and media voices influence her reporting, all she’d have left to cover would be the weather.

“I basically am trying to keep my nose to the grindstone, and if I were influenced by the left-wing blogs and the people who are trying to steer public opinion a certain way, I would be left covering pretty much nothing but the weather now,” she said. “I’m still continuing to do what I see as my job.”

Attkisson has come under fire from liberal groups like “Media Matters for America” for her reporting on the Benghazi terrorist attack and the White House’s controversial political response. Former Obama administration members David Plouffe and Van Jones attacked Republicans for pursuing Benghazi on This Week Sunday, calling it politicized and blaming Fox News for keeping the story alive.

“Well, the key words they use such as ‘conspiracy’ and ‘delusional’ are, in my opinion, clearly designed to try to controversialize a story, a legitimate news story, a legitimate area of journalistic inquiry,” she said. “To some degree, that’s successful, but I think primarily among those that don’t want to look at this as a story in the first place.

Thanks to the work of Crayfisherfiles, we have an at-a-glance chart available to trace the intermarriage of the Obama administration and the Alphabet networks plus CNN. It is a tangled web, in the Sir Walter Scott sense of the term (“Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”) Oddly enough, the only major television news source not implicated represented is Fox News, which has stood alone in defying the MSM norm of ignoring news that might politically harm any Democrat the Nation’s First Black President.

I realize our format does not permit the chart below to be very legible, so please follow this link to get the full effect.

The newly dislodged memo from the Obama White House is effectively the smoking gun proving that President Obama’s handlers sought to deceive the American electorate in the run-up to the 2012 General Election on the issue of Benghazi. Even the refined spin and disinformation skills of White House Press Secretary Jay Carney weren’t enough to “play in Peoria”; the White House Press Corps audibly giggling at his insistence that the issue is a Republican conspiracy theory focused on “talking points.” That the Obama Administration has no problem lying to the American people in the pursuit of its agenda should be troubling enough, but now we have the issue of their complicity in covering-up the deaths – the murders – of four Americans. Anyone else executing the same rhetorical maneuvers would be charged with obstruction of justice, perjury and accessory to murder.

The memo, dated September 14, 2012 – now being referred to as the “smoking gun” memo – shows that then-White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes not only notified political operatives David Plouffe and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney (among others), on the email, but that all involved knowingly launched a disinformation campaign about the cause of the Benghazi attacks. In the memo Rhodes writes:

Subject: RE: Prep Call with Susan: Saturday at 4:00 pm ET

Goals:

▪ To convey that the United States is doing everything that we can to protect our people and facilities abroad;

▪ To underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy;

▪ To show that we will be resolute in bringing people who harm Americans to justice, and standing steadfast through these protests;

▪ To reinforce the President and Administration’s strength and steadiness in dealing with difficult challenges.

The rest is recent history.

Forget for a moment that points one, two and three are absolute and bald-faced lies, rooted in the slash-and-burn political tactic of “say anything to get elected” Progressive politics, and that point four is the stuff of a political campaign memo and not a national security memo meant to inform the American people about the assassination of a United States Ambassador and his security contingent; an act of war. Forget all that for a moment.

What is of note here is: the date of the memo; who was included in the memo; and the fact that the instructions of this memo were carried out over 12 hours later.

That the date of the memo preceded now-UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s Sunday talk show circuit appearances proves that the effort was, in fact, a disinformation campaign. That then-White House Senior Advisor and political strategist David Plouffe, and White House Press Secretary Jay Carney were included in the email proves that there was an illegal coordination between the political and operational offices of the Obama White House. And since the actual deception was executed, just prior to a General Election where there was no clear front-runner, proves that everyone with any weight in the Obama White house – including David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett and President Obama himself – signed off on the execution of this disinformation campaign.

These three points clear, it would, to borrow a phrase from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, require a “willing suspension of disbelief” to believe that the erroneous information championed by the White House in the early days after the Benghazi attacks was both as fully informed as it could have been and not politically calculated. In other words, you would need to have the I.Q. of a fig to believe what is currently being shopped by Jay Carney.

The only conclusion possible for any thinking person is that the Obama Administration got caught with its pants down on the issue of al Qaeda-related terrorism by way of the assassination of a US ambassador and his security detail in Banghazi on September 11, 2012, and that in order to support its re-election political narrative – that al Qaeda was “on the run” – they knowingly and willfully lied to the American people. Again, the President of the United States and his handlers willingly lied about the murders of a US diplomat and three security personnel for political purposes.

1. Noun – Law. The killing of another human being under conditions specifically covered in law…

5. Verb – Law. To kill or slaughter inhumanly or barbarously.

On August 9, 1974, facing the prospect of impeachment, President Richard M. Nixon, resigned the presidency of the United States of America. His “high crime and misdemeanor”: His knowledge and suspected complicity in a cover-up of a politically motivated crime that took place at the Watergate. The History Channel sums it up thusly:

“Early in the morning of June 17, 1972, several burglars were arrested inside the office of the Democratic National Committee, located in the Watergate building in Washington, DC. This was no ordinary robbery: The prowlers were connected to President Richard Nixon’s reelection campaign, and they had been caught while attempting to wiretap phones and steal secret documents. While historians are not sure whether Nixon knew about the Watergate espionage operation before it happened, he took steps to cover it up afterwards, raising ‘hush money’ for the burglars, trying to stop the Federal Bureau of Investigation from investigating the crime, destroying evidence and firing uncooperative staff members. In August 1974, after his role in the Watergate conspiracy had finally come to light, the president resigned. His successor, Gerald Ford, immediately pardoned Nixon for all the crimes he ‘committed or may have committed’ while in office. Although Nixon was never prosecuted, the Watergate scandal changed American politics forever, leading many Americans to question their leadership and think more critically about the presidency.”

Of note, the burglars at the Watergate were seeking to facilitate the gathering of information that would give Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (known derisively as CREEP), an advantage over Democrat nominee George McGovern.

I bring up Watergate in the context of the Benghazi attacks for several specific reasons.

What Did Mr. Obama (and His Principles) Know and When Did He Know It
Just as in Watergate, there are legitimate questions as to when Mr. Obama knew: a) that the attack even occurred; b) that the attack had taken the life of a US ambassador (an act of war); c) that an al Qaeda associated group was responsible for premeditating the attacks; d) that operatives within the CIA, State Department and Pentagon with knowledge of the attacks knew from the first moments that it was a terrorist attack; and e) that approval was given by senior White House staff to deceive the American electorate to shield the President’s reelection bid.

Both Events Resulted in Crimes
Aside from the fact that – both morally and ethically – the Obama State Department was guilty of ignoring critical security assessments for the Benghazi compound calling for tighter and upgraded security before the anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks, three specific crimes have striking parallels when Watergate and Benghazi are examined honestly.

Obstruction of JusticeObstruction of Justice is usually a term used when a criminal or collaborator tries to thwart the investigation of a criminal act. In Watergate, the Nixon White House sought to withhold, destroy, alter and otherwise conceal evidence of wrong-doing from the FBI. With regard to the Obama White House’s response to the Benghazi attacks there was a carefully concerted effort to not only withhold, alter and otherwise conceal evidence of a crime – the murders of four Americans – from an investigative committee of the US House of Representatives, that effort extended to the dissemination of a false narrative – a lie – about the murderous events to the American people in an effort to win an election. Both acts of obstruction of justice – in Watergate and in Benghazi – were executed strictly and exclusively for political purposes.

Accessory to Murder
An accessory charge centers on “a person who assists in the commission of a crime, but who does not actually participate in the commission of the crime as a joint principal.” This charge applies to a plethora of illegal actions, including murder. It is indisputable that US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, Foreign Service Information Specialist Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, were “murdered” (see the definition of murder provided above). As a point of order, the Obama Administration, by its own declarations, see the application of justice where terrorism is concerned as a “law enforcement issue,” so much so that the Holder Justice Department has sought to try 9/11 suspects in United States courts. That understood – and by their definition – they have implicated themselves via the purposeful cover-up, for political purposes, in four murders.

PerjuryPerjury is the “willful act of swearing a false oath or of falsifying an affirmation to tell the truth, whether spoken or in writing, concerning matters material to an official proceeding.” In the Watergate scandal, the Articles of Impeachment consist of three articles: “Obstruction of Justice,” “Abuse of Power,” and “Contempt of Congress.” All three of these articles alleged the act of perjury, whether to an empowered investigator or to congressional committees. All three of these “charges” would be applicable to the actions of some of the most senior members of the Obama Administration, including, Mr. Obama himself, regarding the Benghazi attacks.

In all of these comparisons, the parallels are legitimate. Senior members of the Obama White House – if not the President himself – are, with the advent of the Rhodes memo, implicated in obstruction of justice, accessory to murder and perjury. The only thing that separates Watergate from Benghazi is this: no one died in the total of the Watergate event. Four Americans did die in the Benghazi event; an event tantamount to an act of war; an event diminished and manipulated for political purposes.

I have always asked Mr. Obama’s detractors to “dial back” on the more intense charges against the man; charges that often served the Progressive disinformation and smear machines in maligning honest Constitution-loving Americans. Instead, I begged them, please stick to his policies and actions, because, just like his brethren Progressives of yesteryear, if we allow his actions and policies to play out, eventually he will weave enough rope with which he (or they) will eventually hang himself.

Mr. Obama’s Progressive, oligarchic, elitist, political greed has woven that rope. And no, this is not about the color of his skin. It’s all about the “color” of his politics.

“ARTICLE 1

“In his conduct of the office of President of the United States, Richard M. Nixon, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice, in that:

“On June 17, 1972, and prior thereto, agents of the Committee for the Re-election of the President committed unlawful entry of the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in Washington, District of Columbia, for the purpose of securing political intelligence. Subsequent thereto, Richard M. Nixon, using the powers of his high office, engaged personally and through his close subordinates and agents, in a course of conduct or plan designed to delay, impede, and obstruct the investigation of such illegal entry; to cover up, conceal and protect those responsible; and to conceal the existence and scope of other unlawful covert activities.

“The means used to implement this course of conduct or plan included one or more of the following…”

– Articles of Impeachment adopted by House Judiciary Committee on July 27, 1974

Frank Salvato is the Executive Director for BasicsProject.org a non-partisan, research and education initiative focusing on Constitutional Literacy and the threats of Islamofascism and Progressivism. His writing has been recognized by the US House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention. His organization, BasicsProject.org, partnered in producing the original national symposium series addressing the root causes of Islamist terrorism

There were many rich moments in former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor’s interview Thursday on Fox News’ Special Report with Bret Baier about the Benghazi scandal. Certainly his exasperated protest–“Dude, this was like two years ago”–summarizes the callow nature of the Obama administration (one could almost hear the next Peggy Noonan column being written as the words left the youthful Vietor’s mouth).

Yet there were also interesting moments from a forensic perspective. Vietor disputed the testimony of retired Brig. Gen. Robert Lovell to the House Oversight Committee on Thursday that, in his capacity as chief officer of intelligence for AFRICOM, he knew very soon after the Benghazi assault began that it was a terror attack and not a “demonstration gone awry”–and that the information had been passed up the chain of command.

“Respectfully to the general,” Vietor told Baier, “That’s just not accurate. There’s no way anyone knew definitively the motivations of the attackers that evening.” He added: “I don’t think we know definitively today.”

Though he admitted that the initial claim that there had been demonstrations in Benghazi had been wrong, Vietor stuck to the White House line that it had been legitimate to blame the video for the Benghazi attack.

His source? Not the military, not the Central Intelligence Agency, but the media–specifically, media reports about the motivations of demonstrators who had shown up in anti-U.S. demonstrations in Libya and elsewhere (in their “millions,” Vietor claimed, overshooting just a bit).

“What I’ve seen is, in a number of outlets, reporters talked to people on the scene that night…who said they were there because they were upset about this video.”

When pressed by Baier, Vietor said that the source for the “video” story that the administration relied upon had been “Guys quoted in newspapers saying that’s why they were there,” and not the White House itself.

It is not clear whether that is historically even possible. Journalists did not have access to those present during the attack while it was ongoing, and the White House settled on a story about the video while events were still in progress, meaning that it based its reaction on media reports from Cairo and elsewhere, not Benghazi. Vietor may be referring to media reports that quoted witnesses to the Benghazi attack some time after it happened.

Regardless, what is fascinating is that the Obama administration, and loyal alumni like Vietor, are hanging their defense of the White House’s actions and explanations on media reports–not on intelligence available that night. Vietor grew testy, in fact, when asked to describe events. He admitted Obama had not been in the White House Situation Room, for example, but added that he did not have a “tracking device” on the president.

“Did you also change ‘attacks’ to ‘demonstrations’ in the talking points?” Baier asked him. “Maybe. I don’t remember,” Vietor responded. It was two years ago, after all, he added, using the colloquial “dude,” and perhaps reflecting President Obama’s own tendency to regard everything that happened prior to his election or re-election to have been “litigated” by the electorate and absolved by the purifying force of political victory.

It seems never to have occurred to Vietor that Watergate, too, was about a two-year-old event.

Yet while the Obama crew has never known much about history, they do know plenty about how the mainstream media operate.

They knew relying on the media’s own reports as evidence would make it more difficult for journalists to question the accuracy of the “video” story–assuming, of course, they cared.

Here is the main point: The rioting at the American embassy in Cairo was not about the anti-Muslim video. As argued here repeatedly (see here and here), the Obama administration’s “Blame the Video” story was a fraudulent explanation for the September 11, 2012, rioting in Cairo every bit as much as it was a fraudulent explanation for the massacre in Benghazi several hours later.

We’ll come back to that because, once you grasp this well-hidden fact, the Obama administration’s derelictions of duty in connection with Benghazi become much easier to see. But let’s begin with Jay Carney’s performance in Wednesday’s exchange with the White House press corps, a new low in insulting the intelligence of the American people.

Mr. Carney was grilled about just-released e-mails that corroborate what many of us have been arguing all along: “Blame the Video” was an Obama-administration–crafted lie, through and through. It was intended, in the stretch run of the 2012 campaign, to obscure the facts that (a) the president’s foreign policy of empowering Islamic supremacists contributed directly and materially to the Benghazi massacre; (b) the president’s reckless stationing of American government personnel in Benghazi and his shocking failure to provide sufficient protection for them were driven by a political-campaign imperative to portray the Obama Libya policy as a success — and, again, they invited the jihadist violence that killed our ambassador and three other Americans; and (c) far from being “decimated,” as the president repeatedly claimed during the campaign (and continued to claim even after the September 11 violence in Egypt and Libya), al-Qaeda and its allied jihadists remained a driving force of anti-American violence in Muslim countries — indeed, they had been strengthened by the president’s pro-Islamist policies.

The explosive e-mails that have surfaced thanks to the perseverance of Judicial Watch make explicit what has long been obvious: Susan Rice, the president’s confidant and ambassador to the U.N., was strategically chosen to peddle the administration’s “Blame the Video” fairy tale to the American people in appearances on five different national television broadcasts the Sunday after the massacre. She was coached about what to say by other members of the president’s inner circle.

Walid Shoebat has done a lot of research into the Innocence of Muslims video and he says there isreason to believe that the “Innocence of Muslims” video was a hoax designed to spark the huge outpouring of Muslim rage that it did.

Orchestrated Muslim “Days of Rage” are a well known Muslim Brotherhood tactic.

The CCB conducted an extensive research effort into the elements and sequence of the
administration’s two-week campaign to falsely claim that a protest had preceded the
attack on our Benghazi mission, and their efforts to blame a YouTube video for the
attack. The White House campaign appears to have been well-coordinated with U.S.
Muslim Brotherhood organizations as well as Islamic state members of the Organization
of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), who all joined in condemnation of the video, and, even
more troubling, issued calls for restrictions on Americans’ free speech rights.

§ “Innocence of Muslims” was a 14-minute video trailer about the life of
Muhammad posted to YouTube on 2 Jul 2012 by “Sam Bacile.”

§ In the aftermath of the 11 September 2012 attack on the U.S. mission in
Benghazi, Libya, the U.S. administration ignored facts in evidence indicating that
it was an al-Qa’eda-linked terrorist attack not preceded by any demonstration or
protest and publicly blamed the video instead.

§ The coordinated nature of the international campaign by U.S. Muslim
Brotherhood groups and member states of the Organization of Islamic
Cooperation (OIC) presents the impression that condemnation of the film was
used to further an agenda supportive of the OIC/Muslim Brotherhood objective to
criminalize criticism of Islam and curtail American Constitutional free speech
rights.

The idea that the Obama administration willfully orchestrated a disinformation campaign with regard to the attacks in Benghazi has now been confirmed.

An email written by then-White House Deputy Strategic Communications Adviser Ben Rhodes and obtained by Judicial Watch contained four bullet-point “Goals” outlined as part of the strategy to contain the political damage engendered by the murder of four Americans on September 11, 2012 at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. One bullet-point in particular revealed the Obama administration’s deliberate crafting of a deceitful narrative following the incident. According to the Judicial Watch emails, the objective of the Obama administration was to “underscore that these protests are rooted in an Internet video, and not a broader failure of policy.”

The email was part of a series of 41 new Benghazi-related documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed June 21, 2013. That effort was aimed at gaining access to the documents used by then-UN Ambassador Susan Rice for her September 16 appearance on five different Sunday TV news programs. Rhodes’ email was sent on Friday, September 14, 2012 at 8:09 PM. It contained the following subject line: “RE: PREP CALL with Susan, Saturday at 4:00 pm ET.”

“Now we know the Obama White House’s chief concern about the Benghazi attack was making sure that President Obama looked good,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “And these documents undermine the Obama administration’s narrative that it thought the Benghazi attack had something to do with protests or an Internet video. Given the explosive material in these documents, it is no surprise that we had to go to federal court to pry them loose from the Obama State Department.”

Rhodes’ email was sent to several members of the administration’s inner circle. They included White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, Deputy Press Secretary Joshua Earnest, then-White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, then-White House Deputy Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri, then-National Security Council Director of Communications Erin Pelton, Special Assistant to the Press Secretary Howli Ledbetter, and then-White House Senior Advisor and political strategist David Plouffe.

Another critical email contained in the documents was written by former Deputy Spokesman at U.S. Mission to the United Nations Payton Knopf. It was addressed to Susan Rice and sent on Sept. 12, 2012, at 5:42 PM. It provided a brief summary of the attack, and further revealed that State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland had characterized the compound assault as “clearly a complexattack.” This characterization undermined Rice’s contention that the attacks were “spontaneous.”

Nonetheless when Rice appeared on ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News and CNN she insisted, as she specifically stated on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” that “based on the best information we have to date, what our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy–sparked by this hateful video.”

Sen. John McCain, who immediately followed Rice’s appearance, revealed the utter nonsense of her assertion. “Most people don’t bring rocket-propelled grenades and heavy weapons to a demonstration,” he explained. “That was an act of terror, and for anyone to disagree with that fundamental fact I think is really ignoring the facts.”

The “blame it on the video” fraud so carefully orchestrated by the Obama administration in connection with the Benghazi massacre on the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks has always rested on a premise that remains unquestioned by the mainstream media – and that is itself a fraud. To wit: the Libyan violence, in which a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were murdered, was triggered by rioting at the U.S. embassy in neighboring Egypt which was unquestionably provoked by an anti-Islamic video (an obscure trailer for the more obscure film, Innocence of Muslims).

As I’ve previously recounted, “blame it on the video” was a fraud as to Egypt as well – a calculated fraud set in motion by State Department officials in Cairo who began tweeting about their outrage over the video before the rioting started. At the time they did so, our government well knew both that there would be demonstrations at the embassy and that those demonstrations were being spearheaded by al Qaeda. In addition to the general animus against the United States that is its raison d’etre, the terror network and its Egyptian confederates were animated by their long-running campaign demanding that the U.S. release the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman, the master jihadist I prosecuted in the nineties and who Osama bin Laden later credited with issuing the fatwa that approved the 9/11 suicide hijackings).

There is now more evidence corroborating the fact that al Qaeda-linked jihadists, not the video, propelled the Cairo rioting — just as al-Qaeda-linked jihadists, not the video, propelled the Benghazi attack. Tom Joscelyn of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who is the nation’s best informed analyst of the global jihad and its tentacles, recently testified before the House homeland security committee (specifically, the subcommittee on counterterrorism and intelligence). The testimony, on the topic of al Qaeda’s expansion into Egypt, has been posted at the invaluable Long War Journal site. While it is all worth reading, Tom offers the following observations on the Cairo rioting:

In addition, a contingent of EIJ [Egyptian Islamic Jihad] leaders loyal to al Qaeda’s leader [Ayman al-Zawahiri — the EIJ leader who merged EIJ into al Qaeda] became especially active inside Egypt after their release from prison [following the fall of Mubarak]. They were led by Mohammed al Zawahiri, the younger brother of Ayman al Zawahiri. Until he was re-arrested in 2013, Mohammed al Zawahiri used the permissive environment following the fall of Mubarak to proselytize, often under the banner of “Ansar al Sharia Egypt.” This group was established by one of his former EIJ comrades, Ahmed Ashush. In interviews, Ashush proclaimed his allegiance to al Qaeda, saying that he was “honored to be an extension of al Qaeda.” Although Mohammed al Zawahiri spent much of his trying to win new converts for al Qaeda’s ideology, he likely returned to terrorist operations and was in contact with his brother as well.

Mohammed al Zawahiri was one of the chief instigators of the September 11, 2012, protest in front of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo. The protest turned into an all-out assault on the compound, with the stars and stripes being ripped down and replaced by al Qaeda’a black banner. The protest-turned-assault was a pro-al Qaeda event from the first, with protesters openly praising Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. I have identified at least three other senior al Qaeda-linked jihadists who helped spark the protest: Tawfiq Al ‘Afani, ‘Adel Shehato, and Rifai Ahmed Taha Musa. Al ‘Afani and Shehato are longtime EIJ ideologues and leaders. Shehato has since been re-arrested and charged with leading the so-called Nasr City Cell, which had multiple ties to al Qaeda.

Rifai Ahmed Taha Musa once led the IG and was a close confidante of the Blind Sheikh. He was very close to Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri. He even signed al Qaeda’s 1998 fatwa declaring the formation of a “World Islamic Front for Confronting the Jews and Crusaders.” [ACM: That fatwa is considered al Qaeda’s clearest declaration of war against the United States and presaged the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, and the 9/11 attacks.] The CIA considered Taha Musa to be such an important terrorist that he was tracked down in Syria, where he was detained and deported to Egypt in late 2001.

President Obama’s policy of supporting Islamic supremacists throughout the Middle East led, directly and inexorably, to the empowerment of anti-American jihadists in Egypt and Libya. That is why the administration, in the run-up to what promised to be a close presidential election, worked so hard to deceive Americans into believing the story (absurd on its face) that the murderous violence was caused by a virtually unseen video. I stand by what I concluded last year in arguing that “blame it on the video” was just as fraudulent in the case of the Cairo rioting as in that of the Benghazi slaughter:

Obama’s re-election campaign was premised on the claims that he had decimated al Qaeda, that the war on terror was thus nearing an end, and that his Middle East policy of aiding Islamic supremacists in places like Egypt and Libya was stabilizing the region and fostering the birth of real democracy. The campaign could not afford powerful demonstrations that al Qaeda was anything but in its death throes; that terrorists were still targeting American facilities and killing American officials; and that, under Obama’s policies, Egypt and much of Libya were now controlled by rabidly anti-American Islamic supremacists.

The video fraud enabled the administration and Obama’s reelection campaign to stay on offense – aggressively pummeling the strawman of “Islamophobia” – rather than in the defensive crouch required to explain, or try to explain, the Obama administration’s performance in Egypt, Libya, and the broader Middle East. It worked: The Romney campaign was cowed and accountability for the Benghazi massacre would have to wait many months.

OPSEC will release a new report this week that is critical of Hillary Clinton’s role in Benghazi, Reuters reports.

The OPSEC (military slang for “operational security”) report says Clinton made crucial choices during the attack on Benghazi, which enabled the attack.

“The attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi on September 11th, 2012, actually consisted of three distinct but interconnected phases: an unsupported diplomatic expansion into the city that enabled the attack; an uncoordinated and unresponsive reaction to the attack itself; and a concerted effort after the attack to remain unaccountable,” the report says. “Although a wide range of decisions contributed to each of these individual phases, only one person was responsible for the most critical choices during all three: Hillary Rodham Clinton.”

The report also says the attack was not caused by inadequate information but by inadequate leadership.

According to Reuters:

The group charges Clinton with failing to ask the Pentagon and spy agencies to help U.S. personnel besieged in Benghazi and with not discussing the attack with President Barack Obama until more than six hours after it started. They also say she was not candid in her own accounts of what happened.

The report, entitled “Breach of Duty: Hillary Clinton and Catastrophic Failure in Benghazi,” says that due to a lack of due diligence by Congress, the “full story about Hillary Clinton’s deadly failure of leadership may never be completely told.” It calls for a special congressional investigation of the affair.

TURNING UP THE HEAT:
FOUR NEW MEMBERS OF CONGRESS
CO-SPONSOR BENGHAZI LEGISLATION

Today, we have some very good news to report about H. Res. 36, legislation introduced by Rep. Frank Wolf (R-VA) which would create a special congressional committee to investigate the September 11, 2012 Benghazi attack.

As Ronald Reagan famously said, “When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.” Well, we can tell you that your combined voices on the Benghazi issue are really heating up Capitol Hill!

More and more federal legislators understand that when you say you want a special committee convened to get to the bottom of the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans, including a U.S. Ambassador – you mean business.

THANK YOU.

Over the last few days alone, FOUR Members of Congress have decided to cosponsor Rep. Wolf’s Benghazi bill, bringing the total number of cosponsors to 184. That’s over 80 percent of Republicans in the House of Representatives! Though this is wonderful progress, we must now redouble our efforts so that Speaker Boehner brings H. Res. 36 to the House floor for a vote.

In addition, former Representative Pete Hoekstra (Chair of the House Intelligence Committee) recently commented to Fox news about the ineffectiveness of having five separate congressional committees investigate Benghazi – as opposed to one, focused, committee. The article, “Rep: GOP Disunity Hurts Benghazi Investigation” is well worth a read.

(If one of these legislators represents you, please take a moment to say “thank you!” It goes a long way.)

Does your House legislator place a Benghazi investigation at a high priority? Click HERE for a list of Members of Congress who are NOT cosponsors of H. Res. 36. If you see your legislator’s name on that list he/she needs to hear from you.

Will you help out by taking the easy and quick action noted below?

** Important Benghazi Action Item **

If your House legislator has still not cosponsored H. Res. 36, please contact him/her to ask why, and to express your support for legislation creating a special congressional committee to investigate the Benghazi attack. As always, please be respectful at all times.

(NOTE: H. Res. 36 is NOT the same as H. R. 36. Please be sure to accurately identify the legislation we are supporting, to avoid confusion.)

Click HERE for a list of House Members, by state, who still have NOT cosponsored Rep. Wolf’s bill.

Is your legislator on that list? If so, please contact him/her via phone call or e-mail and request that he/she sign on to H.Res.36 as a cosponsor. Let your legislator know that this is a very important issue to you, and one that you will have in mind when you cast your vote this November.

After all this time, there is no excuse for a Member of Congress not to support a special Benghazi committee. We’ve had months and months of hearings and political theatre on this issue and the important questions remain unanswered.

Let’s keep the heat on high in the U.S. Congress when it comes to Benghazi.

GOP members on the House Foreign Affairs Committee released on Friday a report showing the State Department’s lack of accountability following the deadly terrorist attacks at the compound and the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012.

The report itself did not present anything new other than elements of the most recently released Senate Select Intelligence Committee report related to the Benghazi investigation, which did present new information. Additionally, the House Foreign Affairs report makes repeated references to an Accountability Reform bill, authored by Chairman Ed Royce (R – CA), that is not related to theBenghazi investigation. However, Royce’s own bill has not moved beyond his own committee for nearly a year.

Among other points, the report admonishes then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as present Secretary of State John Kerry for not holding accountable any State Department personnel “for the flawed decisions about security in Benghazi.” The committee also goes after the those who put together the ARB report for not interviewing top State Department officials during their investigation.

Although, the committee makes a reference to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee Benghazi report regarding the lack of accountability State Department official Patrick F. Kennedy has received since the attack, the House Foreign Affairs Committee does not appear to make an effort to hold Kennedy accountable or announce that they’re hauling him back up to reconcile his conflicting testimony.

Royce’s press Committee office would not respond as to why the latest report appeared to only be rehashing established issues regarding the attack in Benghazi and if he believed it was time to investigate the matters through a House Select Committee. A number of members on Royce’s committee are supporters of Rep. Frank Wolf’s effort to form a select committee to look into the the terrorist attack and the investigation after the attack. However, Royce has not signed on as a co-sponsor and House Speaker John Boehner (R – OH) refuses to appoint a committee. The resolution currently has 182 co-sponsors.

In a statement to Breitbart News, Rep. Ros-Lehtinen (R – FL) said:

“Many Congressional reports have been useful in helping to collect information about the truth behind the Benghazi terrorist attacks which resulted in the deaths of Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods. However, I have cosponsored legislation to establish a select committee whose sole purpose is to investigate what happened before, during, and after the attack at Benghazi in order to prevent a similar attack in the future at our diplomatic posts. We must continue to ask the Obama administration officials more questions about what they knew and when did they know in order to get to the bottom of this because the American people deserve answers regarding this horrific terrorist attack.”

Rep. Matt Salmon (R – AZ) , who chairs the subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, is also a co-sponsor of legislation (H.Res.36) to create a select committee to investigate the attack in Benghazi. “I continue to believe the most appropriate and thorough way to investigate the Benghazi tragedy is to establish an investigative select committee that will cut across jurisdictional barriers and provide a comprehensive picture of what went wrong and ensure it does not happen again,” Salmon said in a statement to Breitbart News.

Rep. Wolf has long said that a select committee would give subpoena power to members to compel witnesses to testify under oath, while streamlining the investigative process of all the committees. Although, the House Oversight Committee can issue subpoenas, such a move would happen very rarely.

“The two subpoenas issued by the Oversight and Government Reform Committee today for two of the State Department survivors from the Benghazi attacks to testify before Congress is a welcome and, frankly, long overdue step – but it’s not nearly enough,” Wolf asked in a statement in September of 2013, “Why has it taken more than a year for these first subpoenas to be issued? “Will another year go by before the next subpoenas are issued?

A spokesman of Rep. Jeff Duncan (R – SC) told Breitbart News that “Congressman Duncan has been saying from the very beginning that he only believes the select committee process is able to effective in uncovering the truth.”

Rep. Tom Marino (R – PA) told Breitbart News, “Absolutely. And that’s why I support Congressman Wolf’s legislation. Our consulate was attacked, our ambassador was murdered and no one at State has been held accountable. If the Administration isn’t willing to take action, Congress should.”

CJR: The Benghazi cover up goes way beyond protecting Obama’s re-election bid from a mere failed foreign policy of underestimating al Qaeda. The shocking truth is that Obama has joined forces with al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood in order to overthrow governments in the Middle East and change the balance of power. Obama is negotiating with Iran, a US designated state sponsor of terror, and allowing them to become a nuclear power. The net result of Obama’s policies has been to weaken the US and its allies while empowering its enemies.

Obama’s actions amount to material support for terror. This is the cover up. This is why we need a select committee to expose the truth.

Washington, D.C. – Today, the House Foreign Affairs Committee majority staff issued a report detailing the lack of accountability within the State Department following the September 11, 2012 terrorist attacks at the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya. The report, entitled, “Benghazi: Where is the State Department Accountability,” follows the majority investigative staff’s extensive 16-month oversight, during which staff examined the State Department’s conduct before, during, and after the terrorist attacks.

Before September 11, 2012, U.S. intelligence agencies provided extensive warning of the deteriorating security environment in eastern Libya, including al-Qaeda’s expanding operations and the mounting risk to U.S. personnel and facilities.

These threats were well-understood by even the most senior officials in Washington; then-Secretary Clinton “was certainly aware” of this reporting, as well as the fact that extremists claiming to be affiliated with al-Qaeda were active in the area.

Despite this increasingly dangerous environment, State Department officials in Washington denied requests for additional security from Department personnel on the ground in Libya, and insisted on an aggressive timeline for drawing down support. By contrast, the CIA increased security at its facilities in Benghazi.

The Accountability Review Board (ARB) convened in response to the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam recommended that the Secretary of State “take a personal and active role in carrying out the responsibility of ensuring the security of U.S. diplomatic personnel abroad.”

The ARB convened by Secretary Clinton after the Benghazi attack was seriously deficient in several respects, most notably in its failure to review or comment on the actions of the Department’s most senior officials, including Secretary Clinton herself.

Secretary Clinton and Secretary Kerry have failed to hold anyone accountable for the flawed decisions about security in Benghazi. Instead, the four employees cited by the ARB were temporarily suspended with pay and ultimately reassigned to new positions within the Department. Two of these officials subsequently retired voluntarily, and not as the result of disciplinary action.

The “talking points” controversy further revealed a Department leadership more interested in its reputation than establishing the facts and accountability.

Tellingly, during the entirety of Secretary Clinton’s tenure, the State Department went for a historically long period without a permanent Inspector General, a position central to ensuring a culture of accountability within the Department.

State Department personnel serve the nation with distinction, operating in the most dangerous areas of the world. Their security cannot be guaranteed, nor do they expect it to be guaranteed. What they do expect and deserve is a Department in which everyone is held accountable for his or her performance.

While the Committee will continue to press for accountability, it is incumbent upon President Obama and Secretary Kerry to recognize the failures of senior officials and hold them accountable. Otherwise, another Benghazi scenario, in which U.S. personnel are left vulnerable by irresponsible decision making in Washington, is inevitable.

The report comes two days after the House Republican Leadership published a new website,GOP.gov/Benghazi, devoted to the Benghazi investigations.